One of Sue's blogs the other day got me to thinking about the "good old days"..which I seem to do more and more frequently. Today I'd like to tell you what a Saturday morning was like for me when I was a little girl.

No sleeping in...even if it wasn't a school day, there was work to be done. Saturday morning was laundry day. The males in the house were dispatched to do "manly things" while my mother and I headed for the cellar.

There stood the old Maytag wringer washer and two galvanized wash tubs. A small radio perched on the shelf that contained laundry supplies. A bottle of bleach, a box of Oxydol soap powder and a small bottle of bluing.

The hose was stuck into each container...hot water to the machine and cold water to the tubs. White vinegar was added to the last tub. A small amount of bluing was added to the other...or maybe it was added to the washer, I'm not quite sure and memory fails me here.

While the tubs were filling, my mother turned on the radio. As I recall, we listened to "The Romance of Helen Trent"; "Stella Dallas"; "Young Dr. Kildare" and perhaps a couple of other soap operas that I can't recall right now.

Clothes were sorted into two piles..white and colored.

The sheets were done first...into the washer for whatever length of time my mother decided was needed to get them clean. Swish, swish, swish.

Next, and the most exciting to me, was putting the sheets through the wringer.

"Be careful Audrey...you're gonna get your fingers caught in that wringer if you don't pay attention!"

Mother was right...I did get my fingers caught on more than one occasion because, as my mother informed me..."you were daydreaming."

The sheets fell from the wringer into the first tub..the one with the vinegar. I learned many years later that the vinegar insured the removal of all soap.

If one turned a handle on the wringer, it could be moved around to accomodate wringing out the sheets in preparation for the last rinse...and so it was done.

After the last rinse, the clothes were placed in a bushel basket that was lined with colorful oil cloth.

We marched up the stairs, my mother carrying the basket and I the clothes pins.

Out to the backyard where the clothes lines stood, waiting to do their part. Two iron poles stuck in the ground with cement and rope tied between them, two lines, sometimes more.

One by one, the sheets were pulled from the basket, folded oh so perfectly and pinned on a line with the wooden clothes pins. If I failed to have the pin handy at the exact moment my mother need it, I would hear 'PIN" in a voice that rang with frustration.

Once the clothes were hung, mom grabbed a long pole with a nail on the end of it and put it in the middle of the clothes line and pushed it towards the sky. This was to lift the clothes so they didn't drag on the ground.

When the baskets were empty, it was back to the cellar for another load. The tubs were emptied and refilled when the water was deemed too dirty by my mother. And it was up and down the stairs til everything was hung outside. We must have filled and refilled those tubs 4 or 5 times during the course of the "washing".

Oh Yes, there was a step I almost forgot...there were those items that needed starch. That was a whole other process. These items were placed in a small galvanized pot and got dropped off at the kitchen table where they remained til the last load had been washed.



My mother would then boil a kettle full of water and add some white powder into it...this was the starch. It was meant to add a crispness to white shirts, furniture doiles and whatever else called for stiffness. The items to be starched were dipped in the mixture and wrung out by hand. The startched things were often hung on a small line in the kitchen to dry but usually, if there was room, they were hung out with the ordinary laundry with extra care.

I knew the chore was completed when my mother turned off the raido and put the lid back on the washer.

I didn't much like doing the laundry but as I look back on it now, I'm sure my mother liked it a lot less. Especially since she had put in a 40-hour work week in the shoe factory.

I was more amply rewarded than she...when the wash was done, I was given 20 cents to go to the matinee movie. My mother got to do the rest of the housecleaning. *sigh* I still feel guilty when I think about it.

Maybe next time I'll write about taking down the laundry and what happened to it after it was brought into the house.

Oxydol makes it "shine"...or was it "clean"? I dunno for sure what the jingle was, but it must have been effective..my mother used it.

:)